Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (Routledge Studies in Epistemology)

337 Pages·2019·1.84 MB·English

by  J. Adam Carter (editor), Patrick Bondy (editor)

Well-Founded Belief
Epistemological theories of knowledge and justification draw a crucial
distinction between one’s simply having good reasons for some belief
and one’s actually basing one’s belief on good reasons. While the most
natural kind of account of basing is causal in nature—a belief is based on
a reason if and only if the belief is properly caused by the reason—there
is hardly any widely accepted, counterexample-free account of the basing
relation among contemporary epistemologists. Further inquiry into the
nature of the basing relation is therefore of paramount importance for
epistemology. Without an acceptable account of the basing relation,
epistemological theories remain both crucially incomplete and vulnerable
to errors that can arise when authors assume an implausible view of what
it takes for beliefs to be held on the basis of reasons.
Well-Founded Belief brings together 16 essays written by leading
epistemologists to explore this important topic in greater detail. The
chapters in this collection are divided into two broad categories: (i) t he
nature of the basing relation ; and (ii) b asing and its applications . The
chapters in the first section are concerned, principally, with positively
characterizing the epistemic basing relation and criticizing extant accounts
of it, including extant accounts of the relationship between epistemic
basing and propositional and doxastic justification. The latter chapters
connect epistemic basing with other topics of interest in epistemology
as well as ethics, including: epistemic disjunctivism, epistemic injustice,
agency, epistemic conservativism, epistemic grounding, epistemic genealogy,
practical reasoning, and practical knowledge.
J. Adam Carter is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow,
UK. His work has appeared in Noûs , Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research , A nalysis , P hilosophical Studies, and the A ustralasian Journal of
Philosophy. He is the author of M etaepistemology and Relativism (2016).
Patrick Bondy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wichita State
University, USA. His work has appeared in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,
Dialogue, S ynthese, and E pisteme. He is the author of Epistemic Rationality
and Epistemic Normativity (2018).
Routledge Studies in Epistemology
Edited by Kevin McCain
University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Scott Stapleford
St. Thomas University, Canada
Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology
Edited by Brian Kim and Matthew McGrath
New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism
Edited by Casey Doyle, Joseph Milburn, and Duncan Pritchard
Knowing and Checking
An Epistemological Investigation
Guido Melchior
Well-Founded Belief
New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation
Edited by J. Adam Carter and Patrick Bondy
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Epistemology/book-series/RSIE
Well-Founded Belief
New Essays on the Epistemic Basing
Relation
Edited by J. Adam Carter
and Patrick Bondy
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carter, J. Adam, 1980– editor. | Bondy, Patrick, editor.
Title: Well-founded belief : new essays on the epistemic basing relation /
edited by J. Adam Carter and Patrick Bondy.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies
in epistemology; 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019044402 (print) | LCCN 2019044403 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138503755 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315145518 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Epistemics. | Evidence. | Knowledge, Theory of.
Classification: LCC B820.3 .W45 2019 (print) | LCC B820.3 (ebook) |
DDC 121/.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044402
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044403
ISBN: 978-1-138-50375-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14551-8 (ebk)
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Contents
Introduction 1
PATRICK BONDY AND J. ADAM CARTER
PART I
The Nature of the Basing Relation 13
1 A Doxastic-Causal Theory of Epistemic Basing 15
RU YE
2 All Evidential Basing Is Phenomenal Basing 34
ANDREW MOON
3 Dispositions and the Problem of the Basing Relation 53
HAMID VAHID
4 The Many Ways of the Basing Relation 74
LUCA MORETTI AND TOMMASO PIAZZA
5 Reasons and Basing in Commonsense Epistemology:
Evidence From Two Experiments 92
JOHN TURRI
6 Inference and the Basing Relation 113
KEITH ALLEN KORCZ
7 The Superstitious Lawyer’s Inference 125
PATRICK BONDY AND J. ADAM CARTER
8 Prime Time (for the Basing Relation) 141
ERROL LORD AND KURT SYLVAN
vi Contents
PART II
Basing and Its Applications 175
9 Hermeneutical Injustice as Basing Failure 177
MONA SIMION
10 Agency and the Basing Relation 190
RAM NETA
11 Epistemic Conservatism and the Basing Relation 201
KEVIN McCAIN
12 Can Beliefs Be Based on Practical Reasons? 215
MIRIAM SCHLEIFER McCORMICK
13 Epistemological Disjunctivism and Factive Bases for Belief 235
DUNCAN PRITCHARD
14 From Epistemic Basing to Epistemic Grounding 251
JESPER KALLESTRUP
15 Well-Founded Belief and the Contingencies of Epistemic
Location 275
GUY AXTELL
16 The Epistemic Basing Relation, and Knowledge-That
as Knowledge-How 305
STEPHEN HETHERINGTON
List of Contributors 325
Index 328
Introduction
Patrick Bondy and J. Adam Carter
I The Basing Relation: A Brief Overview
Well-founded belief is belief that is properly held on the basis of good,
justifying reasons.1 Just as it often happens that people do the right thing
for the wrong reasons, or fail to act when they have good reason for act-
ing, it also often happens that people have good reasons for holding a
belief but don’t hold it, or they do hold it but on the basis of some other
bad reasons instead. Of course holding a belief on the basis of bad rea-
sons does not make the belief false, just as performing an action on the
basis of bad reasons does not make the action itself wrong. But in order
to be fully justified, the beliefs that we hold for reasons must be held on
the basis of good reasons .
Epistemologists standardly distinguish between p ropositional justifica-
tion and d oxastic justification. Propositional justification is the justifica-
tion a person can have for holding a belief, even if she does not hold it,
or even if she holds the belief on the basis of some other bad reasons
instead. Doxastic justification is full justification, the justification a belief
has when it is held in the right kind of way.
“Well-founded belief” and “doxastically justified belief” are not quite
synonymous, but in many contexts they are interchangeable. The former
is often the more natural expression to use, though it is more theoreti-
cally loaded, as it suggests a foundationalist account of the structure of
justification. 2 In any case, the latter is the more widely used expression in
contemporary epistemology.
Getting clear on doxastic justification is important in its own right,
but because doxastic justification is plausibly also necessary for other
epistemic statuses such as knowledge and understanding, getting clear on
doxastic justification is of paramount importance for epistemology. A
key ingredient in doxastic justification is the epistemic basing relation,
the relation between beliefs and the reasons on the basis of which they
are held. In order to understand doxastic justification, then, we need to
understand the basing relation. And, with a satisfactory account of the
basing relation in hand, we can go on and use that account to shed light
on a variety of other epistemological issues.
2 Patrick Bondy and J. Adam Carter
The basing relation is an explanatory relation: it provides an expla-
nation of why a subject holds a belief. But it’s not just any kind of
explanatory relation. It explains why a person has a belief specifically
by reference to what are often called “motivating” or “operative” rea-
sons. To illustrate: suppose we want to explain why Jane brews herself
a cup of coffee every morning. Because the caffeine in coffee is mildly
addictive, in some contexts we can explain why Jane brews coffee every
morning by citing the addictive nature of the drink. But the addictive
nature of coffee is not normally a reason on the basis of which Jane
acts when she pours her coffee. It is an explanatory reason but not a
motivating reason. Jane’s (motivating) reasons would be more like, “cof-
fee helps me wake up,” or “I like it,” or “it makes me feel ready for
the day,” or something along these lines. These are the reasons which
prompt Jane’s action, and which Jane sees as making the action of brew-
ing coffee worthwhile. Of course, Jane will often not explicitly think of
these reasons before she brews her coffee. We often perform actions on
the basis of reasons even without explicitly calling our reasons to mind.
Still, Jane has her reasons, and without those reasons she would likely
not brew coffee every morning.
So the basing relation is an explanatory relation which holds between
beliefs and the reasons for which the beliefs are held. The task for us lies
in specifying the content of that relation.
Two broad distinctions will help to orient the approaches to, and the
arguments about, the basing relation. The first distinction is between the
activity of justifying—that is, of providing or at least being able to pro-
vide the reasons on the basis of which one’s belief is held, and which
justify one’s belief—and the state of h aving beliefs that are based on,
and are justified by, the reasons one possesses. Some epistemologists have
held that having doxastically justified beliefs is a matter of being a ble to
provide reasons which justify those beliefs. For example, Stephen Toul-
min has written that
We “know” something (in the full and strict sense of the term) if-
and-only-if we have a w ell-founded belief in it; our belief in it is well-
founded if-and-only-if we can produce g ood reasons in its support.
(1976, p. 89, italics in original)
Toulmin thought that well-founded belief is sufficient for knowledge,
that it requires conclusive reasons, and that it requires that one be able to
produce those reasons. Similarly, Keith Lehrer has written that
if a person has evidence adequate to completely justify his belief,
he may still fail to be completely justified in believing what he does
because his belief is not based on that evidence. What I mean by
Introduction 3
saying that a person’s belief is not based on certain evidence is that
he would not appeal to that evidence to justify his belief.
(1965, p. 169, italics in original)
It is now widely accepted, however, that the state of having beliefs which
are based on, and justified by, one’s reasons, is entirely distinct from the
activity of providing or of being able to provide the reasons on which
one’s beliefs are based, and which justify one’s beliefs. Keith Allen Korcz
identifies several important, widely accepted aspects of this distinction:3
First, and most apparently, being justified in believing p is a state
whereas showing that one is justified in believing p is an action. Sec-
ond, it seems clear, for instance, that one may be justified in hold-
ing a belief even if one lacks the epistemic concepts needed to s how
that it is justified. Thus, one need not be able to justify one’s belief
in order to be justified in holding it. Third, I could attempt to show
that my belief that p is justified even if I am not justified in believing
p. . . . Similarly, I might not be justified in believing p but nonetheless
believe p. Under pressure to justify my belief, I could discover that I
do have good reasons to believe p and perhaps become justified in
believing p on the basis of those reasons.
( 2000 , p. 533, italics in original)
Two of Korcz’s points are particularly important for us here. The first is
that one can have fully justified beliefs, which one holds on the basis of
good reasons, even if one is unable to provide those reasons in defense of
one’s beliefs. (Maybe one lacks the necessary concepts to formulate the
reasons as reasons, or maybe one is simply too nervous and one tends to
forget one’s reasons when asked for them, or maybe some other mecha-
nism intervenes and prevents a person from providing her reasons.) The
second point is that one might hold a belief on the basis of bad reasons at
a time t , and not even realize that there are good reasons for holding it—
1
but then, once one is pressed to provide reasons, one immediately comes
to realize at t that there are other good reasons available for the belief.
2
So, at t one comes to base one’s belief on the good reasons, and one’s
2
belief thereby becomes justified. The point is that at t one has this ability
1
to provide good reasons for the belief, but at t one’s belief is not held on
1
the basis of the good available reasons. So, Korcz argues, being justified
is entirely distinct from being able to provide a justification. That is the
current orthodoxy in epistemology,4 and that is the first broad distinction
to help orient the debates about the epistemic basing relation.
The second important distinction to draw is between causal and dox-
astic accounts of basing. We’ve noted earlier that the basing relation
is an explanatory relation. Causal accounts of basing provide a causal